Site that was de-indexed is back at number one position on Google.
That didn’t take long.
Epik’s IceCreamMaker.com, which was one of the most cited examples of the network’s sites that were de-indexed from Google about a week ago, has been indexed again. It’s also ranked number one in Google when you search for Ice Cream Maker.
Epik’s Luke Webster sent an email to customers today announcing other changes the company has made following the de-indexing of some of the company’s sites:
In addition, on Thursday night, we released a significant upgrade to the product portal that addressees various design elements that may have been a concern for Google. While we stand behind the original design choices, we know that Google indexing is important to many of our Partners.
In terms of immediate next step, we will now start the reconsideration request process for the sites on our platform that were removed from the Google index.
In parallel, we will continue to make some key improvements to the platform to increase usability and ensure a great user experience.
Acro says
Epik is learning fast. They removed the Google AdSense and the Wishpot crosslink. It seems though that this was a single ‘manual’ reversal and not a bulk return of all the de-indexed sites. Epik also removed the revenue indicator from public view of stats, keeping it behind a login page. This will make it impossible to scrape revenue information across all sites in the future, although traffic remains visible. Overall, Epik turned negative publicity to their benefit. As long as their customers make money, it should be an interesting course. Meanwhile, PPC at Sedo and Parked has risen tremendously, which will give Epik and their $249 start-up fee a run for their money.
Jack says
No more adsense means a lot less revenue for the site. Being back in the index is a big step though.
dnclips says
That is great for epik and domainers in general. Frankly I did not expect the sites to be back up soon on Google. Wonderful job Epik.
Anthony Hanner says
@Acro
Epik removed the Adsense from sites built after this issue. However, the older sites still have it.
Troy says
I hope this works out for them…
I don’t think the adsense was a big portion of the site income.
todaro says
maybe it will end up ok. i hope so.
Michael says
In the long run it will never work without unique content, that is the most fundamental building block of any successful site. You can’t auto-generate affiliate spam and expect to domainate search.
Look at the new “eCommerce” site on IceCreamMaker.com… what is different from what got banned? It’s the exact same products, and no unique content. The only difference is the site isn’t participating in the link farm… but that only addresses half the problem.
It may fool the employees that manually review reconsideration requests, but it won’t fool the algorithm that banned the spam sites in the first place. Mark my words.
Oh, and Epik, you forgot to change the copyright in the footer when you copy/pasted your platform, it says copyright EmergencyFood.com on IceCreamMaker.com.
J says
So…
Who makes the revenue if you call the # listed on the site? Both sites have the same number..
Also $500 for free shipping?
Bill says
Well done Epik.
Nothing else really needs to be said. 🙂
Anthony Hanner says
@Bill
One site re-indexed out of thousands? This game is nowhere near over.
Rob Monster says
As of this morning, the IceCreamMaker.com site was the only one that was submitted for re-inclusion in the index. Re-inclusion requests are now being processed on a larger scale in cooperation with owners.
The actual number of de-indexed sites while significant was a minority. In fact, daily revenues are within 5% of the all-time daily record. Several owners revenues are once again back in record territory. No doubt, the seasonal pickup in online shopping is helping to close the gap.
The de-indexing incident was a reminder that success is fragile. The response was methodical. Within days of the incident, we offered owners a two-step solution:
1. A plan to improve the Product Portal platform and a commitment to do what we could to get the sites re-included in the index. This work started immediately.
2. A commitment that sites that did not get re-indexed by January 1 would be eligible for a gratis upgrade to the eCommerce platform — a much more complex solution.
At this point, we have no idea how quickly, or how completely, the rest of the impacted sites will be re-indexed. Here is what we DO know:
1. It is risky to build an online business that is singularly dependent on Google as a primary long-term source of traffic or revenue. Diversification across domains and platforms does reduce this risk.
2. The Epik Partner community was engaged and helpful in bringing the best ideas forward and working with the Epik engineering team to get these ideas developed, tested and deployed.
Finally, John Lawler (SVP Product Development) and I spent the last 2 days at our Operations center in Sandpoint, Idaho. The team that Luke Webster has assembled in Sandpoint are among the most dedicated and passionate people with whom I have ever had the privilege to work. Setbacks notwithstanding, I believe that this is a team capable of remarkable things. Sure, you could bet against them. Personally, I would not recommend it.
Charley says
>>> PPC at Sedo and Parked has risen tremendously <<<
@Acro
Any idea about whypark ?
Tommy says
Slow news day?
Tommy says
Actually I feel bad for Kenneth Hartog.
People are constantly reminded that he wasted both $200 and the potential of a decent domain.
brian k says
@jack I own some epik powered sites.
Adsense was a very small part of the earnings
My newest site with epik is generating 5-7 times the revenue over a simple minisite with adsense. As long as the search engine issues are handled i am a fan
Andrew Allemann says
I have a few Epik Stores and didn’t even realize they had Adsense — all of my revenue from them seems to be from WishPot clicks.
Chris Nielsen says
It’s interesting to see what Google has in their cache for icecreammaker.com and look at the current site. I doubt that pulling adsense allowed them back in, and suspect they changed many things which cloud the issue greatly. It’s clear something worked, or maybe the glitch that took them out was rectified on it’s own and nothing they did affected it’s return. With SEO you never know unless you do a very carefully controlled experiment, even then there are factors that can affect what you see that you cannot know about or control.
In my limited but professiona opinion the SEO on both versions is not very good from what I see on the home pages. If you run it through validator.w3.org there are a “few” problems with the code. I just hope that Epik sifts through all the comments and finds things to help them improve what they are doing and chucks the rest.
roddy says
The wishpot clicks seem to have disappeared from the reporting …..WHY ?????
To say the new admin reports are lame is an understatement
Tom says
@Chris virtually no major site (google.com, yahoo.com, cnn.com etc) hits 100% on the w3c’s validators. With the number of browsers you have to support for a site to look good in all of them, there are a number of conditions where you might use deprecated/non-standard HTML to work around quirks in various browsers.
Some of the errors that the validator reports are useful for debugging, but they’re not meaningful indicators of code quality. A substantive number of the “errors” it reports deal with escaping urls in href’s, which offers no practical value (aside from passing the validators) and adds slightly more processing time and weight to the page.
Hope that helps,
Tom
fred says
@chris, in regards to your comment, “In my limited but professiona opinion the SEO on both versions is not very good from what I see on the home pages. If you run it through validator.w3.org there are a “few” problems with the code. I just hope that Epik sifts through all the comments and finds things to help them improve what they are doing and chucks the rest.”
Passing an HTML validator isn’t very interesting/valid. Even google.com has 35 errors. Yahoo.com has 162.
It’s very common to drop in deprecated html to work with older browsers, or use some hacks so things look good in internet explorer… a perfect validation is irrelevant for modern websites.
The errors that would be of particular interest are unmatched tags, which a quick glance there aren’t any. Most of the errors are about escaping url’s , which is a complete waste of time and has no negative side effects.
Another set of examples:
http://www.amazon.com
496 Errors, 100 warnings
http://www.costco.com
1332 Errors, 1642 warnings
http://www.homedepot.com
382 Errors, 354 warnings
http://www.bestbuy.com
346 Errors, 216 warnings
http://www.newegg.com
559 Errors, 31 warnings
Ambrosine Rose says
What did they do exactly to be de-indexed? Did they ever receive an explanation?
Paul says
I wonder what was meant be, “addressees various design elements that may have been a concern for Google”?
It was interested what Fred posted about the W3C code errors. Its funny that even Google has code validation errors too.